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Did a wizard play a resurrection spell on deceased Dungeons and Dragons creator Gary Gygax? Not exactly, but it turns out that Gary's sons Ernie and Luke are launching a gaming publication called Gygax Magazine this month. What's more, the publisher is a new company called TSR, which happens to be the name of the company that Gygax and partners founded in 1973.

What ensues is an adventure more complicated than the most devious dungeonmaster could devise. Sit down, pass the Doritos and the 20-sided dice, and look over at the player-characters for tonight's session: Luke and Ernie Gygax, working with D&D veterans like former Dragon Magazine editor Tim Kask; Wizards of the Coast (the Hasbro subsidiary which owns the rights to D&D); and Gary Gygax's second wife Gail (not the mother of Luke and Ernie), who represents his estate and claims to "own all rights to the use of his name and likeness, and all intellectual properties." You can follow the characters here and here. As for Gygax Magazine, at this point the Web site merely describes it as a tabletop gaming magazine, states that TSR is not affiliated with Wizards of the Coast, and offers a sign-up list for notification of when the publication is available. However, Kask has said that the magazine will cover a variety of roleplaying games

How this adventure will play out, I have no idea. Wizards of the Coast is likely to defend its copyright, and Gygax's widow will certainly defend her interests, though how you stop two guys named Gygax from publishing a magazine called Gygax will be interesting to see. However, what is clear is that with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue at stake, the dungeon is sure to be full of lurking 57th-Level Attorneys casting Cease-and-Desist spells.

This is not the first time that D&D has moved from the kitchen table to the courtroom, as when Gary Gygax and co-creator Dave Arneson sued each other. Nor is it uncommon in the entertainment world for children of a famous name to cash in on it. Yet it's still sad. D&D has never been my favorite roleplaying game (I'm more partial to games like Traveller or Call of Cthulu), but it is still a cultural icon that introduced tens of millions to roleplaying. D&D is the vanilla ice cream of roleplaying games, perhaps not the most innovative anymore, but the game that other RPGs are and will always be compared to. I suspect that Gary Gygax would have wanted less courtroom drama and more people having fun with the game he loved.